Edwin Morgan's Early Concrete Poetry

ELEANOR BELL Experimenting with the Verbivocovisual: Edwin Morgan's Early Concrete Poetry

In The Order of Things: An Anthology of Scottish Sound, Pattern and Goncrete Poems, Ken Cockburn and Alec Finlay suggest that with the advent of concrete poetry, 'Scotland connected to an international avant-garde movement in a manner barely conceivable today'. The 'classic phase' of concrete poetry in Scotiand, they note, begins around 1962, and, referencing Stephen Scobie, they point out that it should probably be regarded as an experiment in late modernism in its concerns with 'self-refiexiveness, juxtaposition and simultanism'.^ Some of the chief concerns of concrete poetry were therefore to expand upon the conceptual possibilities of poetry itself, instüling it with a new energy which could then radiate off the page, or the alternative medium on which it was presented. Both Edwin Morgan and Ian Hamilton Finlay were instantly drawn to these contrasts between the word, its verbal utterance and its overaU visual impact (or, as termed in Joyce's Finnegans Wake, its 'verbivocovisual presentements', which the Brazüian Noigandres later picked up on). Although going on to become the form's main proponents within Scotiand, Morgan and Finlay recognised from early on that its Scottish reception most likely be frosty (with Hugh MacDiarmid famously asserting that 'these spatial arrangements of isolated letters and geo- metricaüy placed phrases, etc. have nothing whatever to do with poetry — any more than mud pies can be caüed architecture').^ Both poets nonetheless entered into correspondence with key pioneering practitioners across the globe, and were united in their defence of the potential and legitimacy of the form. As wiU be shown, the participation of Morgan and Finlay in this 'concrete moment' in early 1960s Scotland also helps to illuminate crucial tensions between tradition and modernity (or late modernism) evi- dent within the literary and cultural Zeitgeist of the time. While Morgan and Finlay were drawn to the form for different reasons, the debates around concrete reveal an insightful and detaüed cultural snapshot of the period. Although concrete poetry is often readily dismissed as play, not 'serious'

105 ELEANOR BELL poetry, as wül be shown, for Morgan the move towards concrete was clearly jusdfied and also a liberating in several important respects. One of the distinguishing characterisdcs of Morgan's poetic career has been his self-confessed and-traditionalist approach, and, connected to this, his openness to contemporaneity and significant culttiral and technological shifts. For Morgan, the spadal transformations offered by the sixdes (for example, in design culture, to name just one), offered the potential for a radical revisioning of society. One of the appeals of concrete was therefore the experimentation it offered between linearity and spatiality. This, in Morgan's view, extended to clear parallels within 'life itself, that is, with the world that was radically changing 'outside' the text:

The battle between linearity and spatiality which concrete reflects is something that is in life itself and is going to have far-reaching con- sequences . . . When you enter a very modern newly-designed shop or a large open-plan house you may have feelings of unease, you don't see the familiar signposts and you don't quite know where to go or what to do — this is because the concept of space has taken over and it needs some adjustment on your part . . . The problem of concrete, then, is not hard to relate if you start to think about it, to changes that are going on in our society. And if it is important that the arts should be sensitive to these movements of thought and movements of perception which affect or are going to affect people's lives, and I certainly think this is part of their function, then concrete poetry has its place.

This statement appears in notes prepared for a talk on concrete in the early sixdes. In these papers from his personal archive, Morgan explains that he has not simply 'gone over' to concrete. Rather, he explains, 'to me it is a sideline which I find useful and rewarding for producing certain effects'. One of the most important effects of concrete on its readership or audience, he explains, is its ability to challenge the 'well-known insularity' not only within Scotdsh literary culture, but in the UK more widely: 'The English Channel is a pretty narrow strip of water . . . but it's remarkable what an effecdve barrier it can be for the passage of ideas'. The experimentadon with form offered by concrete therefore discourages 'laziness and torpor', especially since, 'the majority of English poets since the war have been busy stacking their neat litde bundles of firewood, but they have stopped planting trees'.'*

106 EDWIN MORGAN'S EARLY CONCRETE POETRY

For Morgan, concrete poetry therefore offered an appropriate medium for the much-needed transformation of the poetic, at a crucial time:

The young painter or sculptor, for example, is working today in an atmosphere of marked creative excitement. This doesn't mean that the assemblages of Rauschenberg or the luminous pictures of John Healey represent the directions art has to take: it is simply that the artist feels himself to be in the midst of a varied and vigorous range of aesthetic activity. The English poet, on the other hand, has been containing himself with a narrowed spectrum in which the traditional looms large and the exploratory has been almost forgotten.

Morgan felt that this reluctance towards the exploratory, this antipathy towards experimentation, was too engrained in British, and. by extension. Scottish culture, and this was. of course, one of the key reasons why he was drawn to the experimentation of the Beats in the USA and to developments in concrete poetry as they were emerging in BrazU. Switzerland and Sweden. As I have commented elsewhere, in the early 1960s Morgan was acutely aware of the problematic nature of tradition weighing down on the shoulders of young Scottish poets."^ This is perhaps most famously explored in his article 'The Beatnik in the Kaüyaird' (1962). where he expresses his view that Scottish culture had become too conservative in outlook, too married to the 'ghost of their country's history'.^ On the one hand, Morgan observes, 'intellectuals and reformers, of course, must guard against lashing themselves into a fury over the Kailyaird' unnecessarily, yet, on the other, he maps out the need for Scottish literary criticism to become more attuned to international literary developments, to seek new forms of inspiration with which to energise from within. For Morgan, this moment in the early sixties represents a much-needed turning point, a moment of reflection in Scottish poetry, in which to stake stock and to chaUenge the dominance of the Scottish Literary Renaissance and its focus on synthetic Scots as the primary medium for artistic expression. Instead, as he points out, 'it would seem sensible to preserve an unanguished flexibUity in this matter of language, suiting your diction to your subject, or to the occasion and the audience.' Morgan suggests that there is 'an important place for sentiment and pathos in any Uterature.' yet the main issue, he finds, is that the Scottish Renaissance has become too removed from the world 'out there':

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It has allowed life, in Scotland and elsewhere, to move on rapidly and ceaselessly in directions it chooses not to penetrate, and the result in i960 is a gap between the literary and the public experience which is surprising and indeed shocking in a country as small as Scotland . . . Almost no interest has been taken by established writers in Scotland in the postwar literary developments in America and on the continent. Ignorance is not apologized for.^°

Whue Morgan's criticism is most often carefully and thoughtfully balanced, some of his early sixties outbursts appear uncharacterisdcally angry by comparison. In this way, Morgan inadvertendy became an important spokesperson for many of the younger generadon of writers and crides who had been feeling increasingly disinvested and excluded from the literary culture at the time. Whue certainly not a lone voice, he is perhaps one of the most eloquent on these matters. Despite his frustradon with the literary scene, Morgan nonetheless managed to critique it from v/ithin rather than rejecdng it outright, as many of his peers were drawn to do, and, looking back on his intervendons it seems that, whether consciously or otherwise, his role was that of intermediary between the overdy angry young writers (including Ian Hamilton Finlay, Alan Jackson, Alex Neish and Alexander Trocchi) and the more established and mainstream writers who they were evidendy kicking against (Hugh MacDiarmid, of course, being the principal figure here)." Many of these tensions were famously brought to a head in 1962 at the International Writers' Conference in Edinburgh. ^^ This was an event that was to have significant historical resonance around the world due to both the sheer volume and international profile of its attendees. The 'Scottish Wridng Today' debates, beld on the second day of the Conference, were particularly scandalous and controversial.^^ Morgan was invited to speak on a panel which included Hugh MacDiarmid and Alexander Trocchi, and subsequently found himself in the cross-fire that ensued between Trocchi's denouncement of the contemporary Scottish literary scene and, by contrast, MacDiarmid's andpathy towards what he dismissed as mere beatnik, naive exuberance.^'* In these debates Morgan was firmly on the side of the anti- traditionaUsts, and took this opportunity to challenge the reluctance towards experimentadon that he found embedded in the Scottish literary scene:

108 EDWIN MORGAN'S EARLY CONCRETE POETRY

I think provincial and philistine are two of the words one would certainly have to apply to .what one sees around one at present. I think that one has also to see Scotland not just at the edge of Europe . . . but also, in a sense, as the edge of something else, at the edge of America. I think this also has to be taken into account . . . We have had far too much tradition in the last fifty years and we want to wake ourselves up and realize that things are happening at the present time and are in the consciousness of everybody, [and these] are the things that a writer ought to be feeling and writing about. Things that are perhaps expressing ones reactions to world events, to international events, this is something that ought to be being thought about ... I think that is what makes Scotland purely provincial, that the things that are really happening in the world, and affecting the whole world are not being sufficiently being taken into account.

In his accompanying article in the conference programme, entitled 'The Young Writer in Scodand', the strength of Morgan's convictions on this issue are again reinforced: 'History wül sigh with relief when it has finally dragged or cajoled our reluctant, suspicious, complaining country into the second half of the twentieth century!'^^ For Morgan, concrete poetry therefore presented an ideal means through which to get beyond the narrowly national and to explore new horizons. Reflecting back on experimentation taking place during the sixties in Scot- land during a talk at the Edinburgh Festival in 2002, Morgan pointed out the seemingly paradoxical notion that concrete poetry was both an international movement and yet strangely peripheral at the same time. Concrete poetry, he writes, 'was an intemational movement that turned out to be strong in Scotland but not in England. When Ian Hamilton Finlay and I began to publish our concrete poetry, eyebrows were raised; could this be poetry? Could this be Scottish? I was ready to answer Yes to both charges. It was a new time'.^' Whüe this statement might appear rather odd given that there were only two main proponents of the form within Scodand at the time and yet several in England (including Dom Sylvester Houédard, Bob Cobbing and John Furnival), for Morgan the effects of this formal experimentation, its ability to deflect the ripples of literary nationalism and generally shake up the literary culture, was nonetheless more strongly evi- denced in the Scottish context. With Morgan's translations of some of the

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Brazüian Noigandres poets and Ian Hamilton Finlay's Poor.Old.Tired.Horse, the profile of concrete poetry in Scotiand was certainly strong, even if Morgan's point about its representation in England remains debatable. ^^ As James McGonigal points out in Beyond the Last Dragon: A Life of Edwin Morgan, the English concrete poet, and Benedictine monk, Dotri Sylvester Houédard (or dsh, as he was known), for example, actually had a vital role in shaping aspects of the small press scene within Scotiand at the time, therefore highUghting the interconnectedness of Scottish and English forms of the genre at an intrinsic level:

Dom Sylvester was staying at Pluscàrden Abbey near Elgin in November 1964, working on biblical translation, but was also in contact with a postgraduate student in Edinburgh, Robert Tait, who wanted him to give a talk there. Dom Sylvester visited [Edwin Morgan] for tea in his new flat in Whittinghame Court at that time, and made a striking impression in his black Benedictine cloak on Great Western Road. He gave him a handful of his typestracts. They also met the foüowing evening in Robert Tait's flat. A year later, after a visit by Gael Turnbull and Michael Shayer of Migrant Press to Prinknash Abbey, we find Dom Sylvester suggesting the need for a critical magazine in Scotland, and also that Robert Tait . . . would be the person to be involved in it. This would come to pass, when [Edwin Morgan] and the Edinburgh poet Robert Garioch co-edited Scottish International with Tait from 1968 until 1970, continuing thereafter as editorial advisers until 1974.'^'

Whüe the English context of concrete poetry was undeniably strong, for Morgan, nonetheless, the effects of the form generated more impact within the relatively smaüer literary culture of Scotiand. For Marjorie Perloff, one of the key critics of experimental writing, concrete poetry is also deeply associated with the peripheries. In her book Un- original Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century, Perloff notes that while concrete was an important international movement, it was strikingly unusual in that it first began to appear largely outside of the major metro- politan centres:

When the revival came after World War II, it occurred not in Paris, where the postwar ethos was one of existentialist introspection as to EDWIN MORGAN'S EARLY CONCRETE POETRY

how France had taken such a terribly wrong turn in the pre-Hitler years, and certainly not in the war capitals, Berlin, Rome, Moscow — but on the periphery: in Sweden (Fahlström), Switzerland (Eugen Gomringer), Austria (Ernst Jandl), Scotland (Ian Hamilton Finlay), and especially Sao Paulo, Brazil.'

The impulse for, and the drive behind concrete poetry, she feels, is therefore largely entwined with postwar recovery and, reflected in this light, it becomes rather obvious why these experimental hubs were often in a sense, decentred. It was not just its Scotdsh exponents who felt that concrete could provide a way of pulling away from the potential insularity of the locai culture. As Perloff notes, this was also the case for other key exponents, for example, the Swiss Eugen Gomringer:

The motivation of these 'constellations', as Gomringer called them, was closely related to the situation in Switzerland in the immediate postwar era. In the 1930s and '40s there had been much talk of German Switzerland's becoming a separate nation and adopting a written German variant of its own. Although the plan was aban- doned, the war further isolated Switzerland, turning it into a neutral island stirrounded by warring power blocs. After the war, a unified but still multilingual Switzerland once again opened its borders to the larger European world, but that world (including Germany itself) was now newly divided by the Iron Curtain. Concrete poetry, Gomringer insisted, could break down the resultant linguistic and national borders by transcending the local dialects associated with Heimatstil, the endemic Swiss nativism. In using basic vocabulary . . . poetry could avoid the local.

Here, once again, concrete poetry emerges on the peripheries, yet as a means of overturning any dependency on the local, resisdng the parochial in its search for a more universal means of communication. Throughout her writings on experimental poetry, Perloff has consistendy retumed to the. importance of concrete poetry and its late modernist trajectory. For Perloff, as with Cockburn and Finlay mendoned earlier, the concrete moment certainly did not present a radical break with modernity (in the manner often attributed to postmodernism, for example). Rather, Perloff describes the concrete moment as arrière garde, that is, as wedded to modem- ELEANOR BELL ism. a late manifestation of it fundamentally indebted to earUer specific experimental modernists.^^ In this way, concrete poetry, as she terms it, might be thought of as 'bringing up the rear' of modernism:

The concept of the avant-garde is inconceivable without its oppo- site. In military terms, the rear guard of the army is the part that protects and consolidates the troop movement in question; often the army's best generals are placed there. When an avant-garde movement is no longer a novelty, it is the role of the arrière-garde to com- plete its mission, to ensure its success.^^

For Perloff. however, this is not to suggest that concrete was without its own radical energy, merely echoing previous forms without a sense of its own autonomy. On the contrary, it has a paradoxical identity that can be viewed as both arrière garde and formally innovative - that is. as deeply informed by earUer modernists yet also containing its own rupture and energy within its own historical moment, generating its ov/n radical potential. Following the work of Willam Marx, Perloff agrees that concrete poetry does not present a nostalgic form of modernism - rather, in its arrière garde status, it represents the 'hidden face of modernity', a deeply- rooted connection with it.^^ WhUe Morgan was much engaged with the deeper theories of concrete as they were emerging, drawn to its modernist origins and roots (for example, in the ideograms of Pound and FenoUosa), for him it was also crucial that concrete connected with its present moment:

I'm interested in concrete poetry as an extension of technique. It's a new instrument which you have to learn to play. You have to find out what it can do and what it can't do. As a language it can be very dense and compressed or very light and delicate, and yet both of these different characteristics are held within a common ideogram- matic quality which seems peculiarly right at the present time. I mean that it's a system of signs, of striking and uncluttered flashes of language which find their place in a world of multiplex and speeded-up communications.^''

Concrete poetry, he writes. '. . . is definitely post-existentiaUst, it's react- ktg against the world of Kafka and EUot and Camus and Sartre. It's more

112 EDWIN MORGAN'S EARLY CONCRETE POETRY interested in Yuri Gagarin and Marshall McLuhan. It looks forward with a certain confidence. It sees a probable coming together of art and science in ways that might benefit both.' It was therefore this forward and, simul- taneously, backward looking nature of concrete poetry which offered Morgan and its other proponents a new aesthetic with which to challenge 'well-known insularity' on the one hand and to explore new forms of spad- ality on the other. While many of his concrete poems are now often taught in Scotdsh schools, packaged as a light-hearted and 'accessible' way into literature for young children ('The Loch Ness Monster's Song' being perhaps the most obvious example, although many others could be substituted here instead), for Morgan concrete was nonetheless a serious ardstic form, a serious form of play, not a gimmick, and its verbivocovisual composition facilitated the ability to probe new spaces of the poedc imaginadon, to tap into experimentadons with form taking place elsewhere, for example, in art and music. Morgan's detailed archives reveal that he was in correspondence with many of the main pracdtioners of concrete throughout the sixties, and his various critical writings and notes on concrete reinforces his strong belief in the legitimacy of the form. Morgan corresponded with brothers Augusto and Haroldo de Campos, who, along with Decio Pignatari were responsible for producing the 'Püot Plan for Concrete Poetry' in Brazil in 1958. In this manifesto, the Brazilian poets, or as they were known (stem- ming from the influence of Ezra Pound, the Noigandres), assert that the: 'concrete poem is an object in and by itself, not an interpreter of exterior objects and/ or more or less subjective feelings, its material: word.' {sic)?^ Concrete poetry, they continue, 'begins by being aware of graphic space as structural agent.' Morgan's annotadons on personal copies of the 'Püot Plan' reveal that he was critically pondering such formuladons, considering their applicability to his own experimentations. An apposite example of 'graphic space as structural agent', for example, can be found in Morgan's poem 'Pomander', written in the 1960s, yet collected in From Glasgow to Saturn (1973):

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pomander open pomander open poem and her open poem and him o p en poem and hymn hymn and hymen leander high man pen meander o pen poem me and her pen me poem me and him om mane padme hum pad me home panda hand o p en up o holy panhandler ample panda pen or bamboo pond ponder a bonny poem pomander opener open banned peon penman hum and banter open hymn and pompom band and panda hamper o i am a pen open man or happener i am open manner happener happy are we open poem a nd a p o m poem a nd a pan d a poem and aplomb

The poem, as we can see above, makes use of graphic space to visually represent the object itself, with the blank spaces between the words on the page representing the air holes of the pomander, which are also, of course, the spaces which separate out all of its possible meanings, that, is, the words on the page itself. Yet these words within the pomander self-consciously generate their own complexities: the pomander is opened out in the second and subsequent lines, revealing a variety of engaging word-plays and juxta- positions (him and hymn, hymn and hymen, and so), and there is sense of the object being fully opened out in a rather comical fashion ('open up o holy panhandler') and perhaps slowly closed again, or at least some form of resolution being reached ('poem and a panda/ poem and aplomb'). The pomander is also given a Scottish inflection ('ponder a bonny poem pomander opener'), as well as an obviously spiritual one, in the form of a Buddhist mantra, ('om mane padme hum'). At the root of aü of this is a

114 EDWIN MORGAN'S EARLY CONCRETE POETRY

Strong sense of play, of a connection with its sixties moment ('oh I am a pen open man or happen er'). Commenting on the potential of meaning in 'Pomander', Morgan has noted:

The lines are arranged in the imitative form of a pomander. I take the idea of a pomander as a round object which in some way is opened up (either by having holes in it, or by being actually open- able) to release its fragrance - I had one in mind particularly which opened like the segments of a cut orange. I use this to bring out the theme of opening up the poem, opening it up spatially, and in a broader sense the theme of opening out life, life itself (or the round world) as a pomander, its secrets and treasures and rare things not to be hoarded but opened up and made visible. To keep this wide range viable within a concrete form, the poem uses associative imagery within a deliberately narrowed range of sound-effects.

For Morgan, concrete poems are therefore not merely intended to experiment with space and form - they also contain the possibüity, as suggested here, of opening out 'life itself. Whüe some of the key critics of concrete have linked the form to its purely formal values, Morgan's experimentations with concrete often contain elements of wit and personality, a presence of some kind within the text.''^ This is one area where we can see Morgan breaking away from some of the strict criteria as laid down in the 'Püot Plan': 'Concrete Poetry: total responsibiUty before language. Thorough real- ism. Against a poetry of expression, subjective and hedonistic'. In Morgan's concrete poems, which encompass a vast and eclectic range of topics, there is often a sense of lived experience - human or otherwise.^^ Such an approach perhaps differs quite markedly from the view of concrete taken by other critics. David Küburn, writing in 1966, for example, was of the opinion that concrete should evade any concerns with consciousness or the ontological:

Traditional poetry may be regarded as the creation of a personal poetic consciousness with memories, thoughts, experience of the world, ideas and feelings, in short a world to which the poet gives verbal expression not as an attempt to communicate this world (which would be best to foster a cheap illusion) but as part of a process by which the poet reaches an orientation to essentially hidden ELEANOR BELL

areas of his own experience and perceptions and enables the reader to engage in a similar process: essentially an ontological pursuit. Concrete poetry differs in that it does not refer to any consciousness and is not concerned with worlds or experience, real or imaginary and is thus not ontological. ^

By comparison, the connection with mindscapes, human or otherwise (including animal, insect, computer and alien!), have been a consistent com- ponent of Morgan's poetic output, concrete or otherwise, and giving voice to animate and at dmes inanimate objects has been part of his playful trajectory. Even in the very pared down form of concrete poetry, Morgan often managed to let humour and human experience radiate through:

I'm interested in concrete poetry as something that I relate to concrete human experience. I'm not concerned with its potentialities for nonsemantic or abstract pattern (except of course that on occasion one may ttse the ostensibly nonsemantic or abstract for an overall semantic purpose). I see it as an instrument of immediate communication: a flash; a blush; a burst; a curse; a kiss; a hiss; a hit; a jot; a joke; a poke; a peek; a plea; an ABC. An instrument of communication, but also an instrument of pleasure.^^

In this insistence on the semantic funcdon of his own concrete poems, Morgan can be seen to challenge some of the expected convendons of the form; yet he does so in order to expand the power of its immediate effect. One of the key figures in shaping changing conceptions of culture and space during the 1960s was, as mentioned earlier, Marshall McLuhan. In The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media (1964), for example, McLuhan was concemed with mapping out the effects of new technologies on consciousness- with taking the technological pulse of the period. In 1967, the Something Else Press (founded by Dick Higgins and well-respected for its concrete poetry and Eluxus publications) produced McLuhan's Verbi- voco-visual Explorations, the tide of which in itself revealing some of the sinni- larities between McLuhan's work and that of the concrete poets.^*" For McLuhan, as for Morgan, verbivocovisual experimentations were fundamentally linked to changes in the world 'outside' of the text, to the new media, the media of communicadon, and the reshaping of consciousness these implied. Morgan's archives from this dme reveal a debt to McLuhan's

116 EDWIN MORGAN'S EARLY CONCRETE POETRY thinking on these matters, demonstrating that concrete poetry was very much a natural extension of such interconnections:

Marshall McLuhan describes . . . the movement away from the printed book, away from the Unear. towards a more 'open', instan- taneous, spatial experience which technology has presented us with in newspaper and radio, film, TV, advertising, and in computers which offer us a kind of extension of human consciousness ... He says. 'All the new media, including the press, are art forms that have the power of imposing, like poetry, their own assumptions. The new media are not ways of relating us to the old 'real' world; they are the real world, and they reshape what remains of the old world at will.' (Explorations in Communication (i960)). — This. I think is relevant to concrete poetry. The concrete poem isn't meant to be something you would come across as you turned the pages of a book. It would rather be an object that you passed every day on your way to work, to school or factory, it would be in life, in space, concretely there.

Concrete poetry was deeply entwined with this imagining of new aesthetic configurations of spatiaUty and temporaUty. The form itself, the medium in McLuhan's terminology, was therefore inseparable from the mood of the time, that is, with breaking away from outmoded forms and looking towards new forms of expression. Concrete may have been oper- ating within a broadly modernist trajectory, or in Perloff's terms, 'bringktg up the rear' of modernism in its arrière garde concerns - yet it was also inevitably switched on to its present moment at the same time. With the benefit of hindsight it is therefore possible to see why this move towards concrete was so attractive for Morgan. In its deep affiliations with new media, and with the changes in consciousness these offered, concrete poetry presented an opportunity for the reader or viewer to become an active parti- cipant in the changing world around them, to become more engaged within, and self-conscious of, the world 'out there.' In Morgan's own words, 'what [concrete poetry] gives us is something quite smaU. but it may be a small key that opens a large door.' ELEANOR BELL

Notes

1 Ken Cockburn and Alex Finlay (eds). The Order of Things. Scottish Sound, Pattern and Concrete Poetry (Edinburgh: Pocketbooks, 2001), pp.13, 18. 2 '[. . .] Morgan's prominence in connection with 'Concrete Poetry' and with Ian Hamil- ton Finlay rules him out completely as far as I am concerned. I will not agree to work of mine appearing in any anthology or periodical that uses rubbish of that sort, which I regard as an utter debasement of standards but also a very serious matter involving the very identity of poetry. These spatial arrangements of isolated letters and geometrically placed phrases, etc. have nothing whatever to do with poetry - any more than mud pies can be called architecture . . .' Alan Bold (ed.). The Letters of Hugh MacDiarmid (London: Hamilton, 1984), 703. 3 Draft of article 'Concrete Poetry' in Glasgow University Special Collections Ace 4848/ Box 69 Concrete/ Sound Poetry. 4 Glasgow University Special Collections Ace 4848/Box 69. 5 Glasgow University Special Collections Ace 4848/Box 69. 6 Eleanor Bell "'The ugly burds without wings?": Reactions to Tradition since the 1960s' in Fran Brearton, Edna Longley and Peter Mackay (eds). Modern Irish and Scottish Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp.238-50. 7 Edwin Morgan, Essays (Cheadle: Carcanet, 1974), p.167. 8 Ibid. p. 168. 9 'There is no reason now to suppose that a Scottish poet cannot write good poetry in English, as Edwin Muir, Norman MacCaig, W. S. Graham, and Hugh MacDiarmid himself have done. There is equally no point in questioning the achievement in Scots of Under the Eildon Tree or Sangshaw or Soutar's bairnsangs and whigmaleeries.' (p. 173). 10 Ibid., pp.168, 174. 11 For example, venting his frustration against the Scotdsh Renaissance poets, Ian Hamil- ton Finlay, in a letter to Lorine Niedecker, exclaimed 'I who was once rather gentle and tolerant, am now going to make them RUE THE DAY THEY showed their con- tempt for beauty . . . I'm going to fight them to the death - the whole horrible lot.' In a printed sheet inserted inside the third number of POTH, Finlay railed: 'We began with a feeling of warmth and open-ness. We are now going to return hate for hate.' See Alec Finlay (ed), Ian Hamilton Finlay: Selections (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), p.23. In his long essay on culture and nationalism, 'The Knitted Clay- more', Alan Jackson states with exasperation, 'The nationalist writer seems to conceive of tradition as something specific and destined, like a slab of shortbread handed to a babe which he chews till finished, then dies.' Lines Review, 37, June 1971, p.25. Other writers, including Alexander Trocchi and Alex Neish simply left the country rather than trying to negotiate their own place within it. In an e-mail to the author on 13* August 2010, for example, Alex Neish stated that: 'In the late '50s and early '60s new Scottish literature was in the doldrums. The late printer and publisher Callum MacDonald did more than anyone to keep it alive. At his own expense he paid for poetry editions. He printed an Edinburgh University magazine I was editing and invited me to take over as Editor of his Jabberwock which sought to find something good in contemporary literature of the period. With the exception of Norman MacCaig, the

118 EDWIN MORGAN'S EARLY CONCRETE POETRY

early Sydney Goodsir Smirh, and Tom Scott, this was a dire batrle. I soon tired of the straggle and irs endless parochial obsessions and decided ro move into a more international field. This gave birth to the American issue of Jabberwock which is now a col- lector's irem. It featured writers like Alan Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Gregory Corso, Kerouac and William Burroughs. In the Scottish literary establishment ir was received wirh shock and hostiliry and in rhe process Jabbenvock folded. As a phoenix Sidewalk was born ro focus on new writing from the Stares and rhe French nouvelle vague. It was very much a one-man show and when I moved in 1962 ro Argentina ir died as there was no one to carry rhe flag forward.' 12 See Angela Bartie and Eleanor Bell (eds). The International V/riters' Gonfereme Revisited: Edinburgh, 1^62 (Glasgow: Cargo Pubhshing, 2012). 13 This debate was chaired by David Daiches and speakers included: Douglas Young, Hugh MacDiarmid, Naomi Mirchison, Robin Jenkins, Alexander Reid, Walrer Kier, Edwin Morgan, Alexander Trocchi, Sydney Goodsir Smirh and Stephen Spender. The questions that speakers were invited ro comment on included: 'What is rhe srrengrh of Scorrish writing roday and how is ir related ro the Scortish literary rradi- rion? Should Scotrish writers deal principally wirh Scorrish rhemes, and if rhey do, what market do they have outside Scorland? Has rhere been a Scorrish Renaissance in recenr years, and how successful have been rhe arremprs ro use Lallans as a literary language?' 14 Many of rhe outbursts at rhe Scortish Day of rhe Conference are now infamous. Ir was on rhis day, for example, rhat Alexander Trocchi srared rhar 'I rhink frankly rhar of what is inreresring in the last, say rwenry years in Scortish wriring, I have wrirten ir all', ro which Hugh MacDiarmid responded with fury: '. . . Mr. Trocchi seems ro imagine rhar rhe burning questions in rhe world roday are lesbianism, homosexuality and marrers of that kind. I don'r rhink so ar all. I am a Communist, and a Scotrish National- ist and I ask Mr. Trocchi and orhers, where in any of rhe lirerarure they are referring ro us ... us ro, are less provincial than our own, and so on, are the crucial burning ques- rions of rhe day being dealr wirh, as rhey have been dealr wirh in Scorrish lirerarure, if you knew enough abour ir.' See Barrie and Bell (eds), pp.69-70. 15 Ibid, p.67. 16 Ibid, p.82. 17 Edwin Morgan, 'Scorrish Ficrion' in Scottish Left Review, issue 12 Sepr/Ocr 2002, pp.1 8-20, p.18. 18 As Mary Ellen Solr nores in her Goncrete Poetry: A World View (1968): 'Alrhough England cannor lay claim ro having been in on the laying of rhe foundations of rhe concrere poerry movement, imporranr exhibitions have been held rhere. We have nored rhe First Inrernational Exhibirion of Concrere and Kineric Poerry in Cambridge in 1964, organized by Mike Weaver. Another imporranr comprehensive exhibirion, 'Berween Poerry and Painting', organized by Jasia Reichardt, was held ar rhe Insriture of Con- remporary Arr, London, in 1968. The London Times Literary Supplement pur our rwo special numbers on inrernarional avanr-garde poerry on Augusr 6 and Seprember 3, 1964.' The full rexr of Solr's book is available online ar hrrp://www.ubu.com/papers/ solr/. 19 James McGonigal, Beyond the Last Dragon: A Life of Edwin Morgan (Dingwall: Sandsrone Press, 2010), p. 137. 20 Unoriginal Genius, \. 21 Unoriginal Genius, pp.64-64.

119 ELEANOR BELL

2 2 'The point here is that whereas the Surrealists were concerned with "new" artistic content - dreamwork, fantasy, the unconscious, political revolution - the concrete movement always emphasized the transformation of materiality itself. Hence the chosen pantheon included Futurist artworks and Finnegans Wake, Joaquim de Sousandrade's pre-Modernist collage masterpiece The Inferno of Watt Street (i 877), and the musical com- positions of Anton Webern, Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and John Cage.' Unoriginal Genius, pp. 6 7 - 8. 2 3 Unoriginal Genius, p. 5 3. 24 This paradoxical tension is neatly summarized in the title of PerlofF's 2010 book, Unoriginat Genius, as mentioned above. Commenting on the distinctions between postwar recovery vs. the original sense of 'discovery' posited by modernism, Perloff writes: 'Here is the important distinction between avant- and arriere-garde. The original avant- garde was committed not to recovery but discovery, and it insisted that the aesthetic of its predecessors - say, of the poets and artists of the 1890s - was "finished". But by midcentury the situation was very different. Because the original and avant-gardes had never really been absorbed into the artistic and literary mainstream, the "postmodern" demand for total rupture was always illusory. Haroldo de Campos, following Augusto's lead, explains that the concrete movement began as rebellion - "We wanted to free poetry from subjectivism and the expressionistic vehicle" of the then poetic mode.' {Unoriginat Genius, p.67). 25 Perloff is referring to William Marx's tes arrière-gardes au xx' siede {Unoriginat Genius, P-53)- 26 Glasgow University Special Collections Ace 4848/Box 69 Concrete/ Sound Poetry. 27 Glasgow University Special Collections Ace 4848/Box 69 Concrete/ Sound Poetry. 28 'The 1960s, however, have seen a tentative widening of the English poet's field of operations. Concrete or spatial poetry (both terms are used) in its different forms has begun to make an impact, and it's interesting that this at once links up with the spatial- izing tendencies already seen in art and music. It's as if poets were suddenly becoming aware of a time-lag which had been withdrawing them farther and farther from the cultural experience of their fellow artists.' Glasgow University Special Collections Ace 4848/Box 69 Concrete/ Sound Poetry. 29 Morgan corresponded with many of the key concrete poets including Haroldo and Augusto de Campos, Eugen Gomringer, Ernst Jandl, Cavan McCarthy, Dom Sylvester Houédard, Bob Cobbing and, of course, Ian Hamilton Finlay. 30 On the origins of the title 'Noigandres poets', Perloff quotes Ezra Pound's Gantos: 'Noigandres, NOIgandres! You know for seex mons of my life/ Effery night when I go to bett, I say to myself:/ Noigandres, eh noigandres. Now what the DEFFIL can that mean!'. {Unoriginat Genius, p.66). The 'Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry' is available at onhne http://www.ubu.com/papers/noigandresoi.html. 31 Glasgow University Special Collections Ace 4848/ box 38. 32 Mike Weaver, for example, has commented that: 'Concrete poetry is an aesthetic movement in poetry, only indirectly concerned with moral, social and psychological values. This is not to say that concrete art and poetry are not fully committed to the improve- ment of the environment, but only the BraziUans and Czechs have shown any inclin- ation for social or political engagement. The main emphasis has fallen on formal values.' 'Concrete Poetry' Lugano Review, vol i, summer 1966, pp.ioo-55. Morgan, by contrast, has written that: 'Each of my poems has a 'point' and it is not just an object of contemplation, though it is also that. I like to hear the semantic mainsheets whip EDWIN MORGAN'S EARLY CONCRETE POETRY

and crack, but not snap. I like to extend the possibilities of humour, wit, and satire through concrete techniques and although this involves 'play', whether of words, letters, or punctuation, it hiust be an imaginative and therefore fundamentally serious kind of play.' Nothingnot Giving Messages, p.256. 33 See for example Starryveldt (1965), Emergent Poems (1967), Gnomes (1968) and The Horse- man's Word (1970). 34 David Kilburn, "Type is Honey" Mermaid, Vol 3;, no 3, January 1966, pp.9-11, p.10. 3 5 Glasgow University Special Collections Ace 4848/Box 69. 36 It is worth noting that Something Else Press also published Emmett Williams' important Anthology of Concrete Poetry in 1967. 37 Glasgow University Special Collections Ace 4848/Box 69. 38 Glasgow University Special Collections Ace 4848/Box 69.

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